The business side of photography
A Toronto model agency includes these terms for booking any of its talent:
• Models don’t work for free.
• Minimum one hour booking and the time is rounded up to the next full hour. Model gets paid for the full time booked and not necessarily the actual time for the shoot.
• Model gets paid for travel time and preparation time.
There’s a Canadian federal election coming in early May. One would think that if a party wants to run the country then surely it should be able to run a web site.
The Liberals have the slowest loading site of the bunch. Almost painful, but let’s be charitable and assume the site was just busy today. This site uses free WordPress blog software but it fails XHTML validation. The design is consistent and it uses the party’s traditional red–white colour scheme.
The two-year-old portrait of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff is outdated. What does it suggest when the party couldn’t be bothered to get a new business portrait for something as important as a federal election? But again, to be charitable, let’s say the Liberals used an old picture just to save a few bucks.
The site has photo captions and credits on many of its pictures. The party has hired at least one experienced news photographer, but the site suffers from either non-existent or just plain bad photo editing.
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There are several e-mail scams aimed at photographers. Most start with the sender of the e-mail saying that they came upon the photographer’s web site and they love the pictures. The person will have some sort of urgent photo assignment in the photographer’s area and wants to hire the photographer right away. The person will offer to pay in full in advance.
If the photographer falls for this, the scammer will send a payment cheque for far too much money. When the honest photographer points out this “mistake,” the scammer will apologize and ask the photographer to refund the excess money as quickly as possible. The trusting photographer will be told to wire the money asap. The scammer’s original cheque will later bounce and the photographer will lose whatever money they sent to the scammer.
Another version of this scam is that after the scammer has sent a (fake) cheque, they will say the event has been cancelled and they need the money wired back to them as quickly as possible.
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A few things don’t seem to make sense:
— Order a $1.49 hamburger at a fast-food joint and you have to pay before they give you the food.
Order an $85 steak dinner at a restaurant and you don’t pay until the food has been eaten.
— Some amateur photographers spend thousands of dollars buying top-of-the-line cameras to photograph things a $400 camera could do as well.
Some professional photographers who own top-of-the-line cameras use a cheap toy camera to do their photography.
— A company spent about $47,000 to buy five full-page black-and-white ads in a Toronto tabloid newspaper. Then it budgeted less than $500 for the photography for those ads.
Why not spend $25,000 for five half-page ads and then budget, say, $2,500 for the photography? Not only would this save the company thousands of dollars but the better quality photography will earn the company more attention.
One important job at large entertainment events is to let the photographers know who they’re photographing. This is when sign holders come in handy.
Attention photographers. This is why you never use those silly, big flash brackets while standing in front of other photographers:
I’m standing in the second row – on a 20-inch riser – at a Toronto entertainment event. I’m shooting overtop a front row of standing photographers.
Notice that you can’t see the front row of standing photographers nor can you see their cameras or flashes. Except . . .
Except that one guy, in the front row, using one those big flash brackets. In the front row. In every single picture.
The musicians are standing 17 feet away and they’re fully lit by two large front lights and two hair lights, all supplied by the event. These four large lights were specifically colour-balanced to match the existing eight overhead lights, (ISO 1000, f5.6 at 1/160). Why even use a flash?
News and entertainment events are not weddings. In these situations, big flash brackets serve no purpose other than to block other photographers.
It should be easy to find the right photographer for your business photography, right? After all, every city has many, many professional photographers.
Recently, I was reading a web site for photographers who are new to running a photo business. These amateur(?) photographers were apparently hired by various clients to shoot corporate work, advertisements, business marketing or editorial assignments. Yet these photographers didn’t know how to price their work or, in some cases, even how to do the assignment. Why would any business hire an amateur photographer?
How should a business find the right professional photographer?
The best way is by referral from another business or a colleague. If this isn’t possible then a search engine is your best friend (or enemy).
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